It was a year ago last February when songwriter Ryan Adams was hit with allegations of emotional abuse and sexual misconduct by seven different women, including Phoebe Bridgers, This Is Us star Mandy Moore, and one woman who says she was only 14 when they were involved. Since then, the FBI launched an investigation into Adams’ behavior, his upcoming music was delayed, and the Heartbreaker artist returned to Twitter with the promise that he had “a lot to say” and would be sharing it soon. “All the beauty in a life cannot be reduced to rubble for lies,” he wrote.
Contrary to the tweet, Adams has more or less stayed off the radar since then. Over the holiday weekend, however, he returned with an apology published in The Daily Mail.
“There are no words to express how bad I feel about the ways I’ve mistreated people throughout my life and career,” he begins in the piece, which documents his pursuit of sobriety with “professional help.” He adds, “[N]o amount of growth will ever take away the suffering I had caused. I will never be off the hook and I am fully accountable for my harmful behavior, and will be for my actions moving forward.”
He acknowledges in the piece that many read it as “the same empty bullshit apology that I’ve always used when I was called out,” and, well, he’s not wrong. This morning, Moore, his ex-wife, addressed the apology on Today, saying that she finds it “curious that someone would make a public apology but not do it privately.”
“Speaking for myself, I’ve not heard from him,” she continued. “I’m not looking for an apology necessarily, but l do find it curious that someone would do an interview about it without actually making amends privately.”
Moore spoke at length with the New York Times about the abuse she endured in their marriage. “What you experience with him—the treatment, the destructive, manic sort of back and forth behavior—feels so exclusive,” she said in the paper’s initial report. “You feel like there’s no way other people have been treated like this.”
Watch that section of the interview below.
Moore’s comments echo others made by Karen Elson, a model and singer who previously described a “traumatizing experience” with Adams. In a tweet last Friday, she also noted that he had yet to reach out to her, adding that he called her a “liar” in the wake of his abuse.
Adams also made the questionable choice in his apology to share that he’s “written enough music to fill half a dozen albums.”
“Some of these songs are angry, many are sad but most of them are about the lessons I’ve learned over the last few years,” he said. “Those ones an expression of my deepest remorse.”
Adams had initially planned to release three new albums in 2019.